Creative thinking and brainstorming in order to innovate new products, technologies and solutions can be challenging, time-consuming and limited to the knowledge, background, education, experience, imagination and other personality and thinking traits of people involved in the innovation process.
Innovation can be a source of sustainable competitive advantage and lasting success in the fast-changing business world. Innovative thinking can lead to inventions for new products, technologies and solutions to increase productivity and efficiency, and improve the quality of products and services. Creativity may manifest itself in design, art and music, each of which may also contribute to competitive advantage and success. Inventing is usually done by creative individuals through their own internal thinking patterns, or from brainstorming sessions which provide collaborative stimuli to assist in the creative thinking process. These brainstorming sessions may be loosely structured by an agenda around an area of interest and will be limited by the creative and imaginative thinking patterns of the session participants. Although the individuals may be creative, they may not be able to think of all the innovative choices for an area of interest in the brainstorming session. For example, the individuals participating in the brainstorming session may only represent a small subset of all the possible technology disciplines. As such, they may not know of or think of alternatives, improvements and other creative elements that may be applicable to or used in the area of interest. Furthermore, the individuals may not think of a creative element mainly because their particular thinking patterns prevent associating or applying the creative element to the area of interest. For example, one may not think of combining a microprocessor with a toothbrush in a brainstorming session. Because humans tend not to be highly detailed, most people find it difficult or tedious to enumerate all the species, details or embodiments of an invention that is conceived as a broad concept. For example, if one tried to list every type of metal, it would be quite difficult without reference to a published list.
As the pace of change in new product development accelerates, the pace of innovation in product development also needs to accelerate to sustain competitive advantage, to provide or continue commercial success, or just to continue to develop new products. Methods and systems are desired to increase the speed and efficiency of inventive processes and to accelerate innovation to provide new commercially viable ideas, such as products, designs, music, and services for the marketplace.
Additionally, filing patent applications may be necessary to protect the investment in research and development of the invention and to sustain the competitive advantage and commercial success desired by the invention. The filing date of a patent application can be critical for establishing a priority right against others and for protecting the invention. Any delays between conception of an invention and drafting a patent application may result in a delay in a filing date, and thus, possibly hindering the protection of the invention. Especially with the accelerated pace of change in new product development, the pace of developing an invention from a concept to a filed patent application also needs to accelerate. As such, methods and systems are desired to increase the speed and efficiency of drafting and filing patent applications to protect inventions.
Computation tools are excellent at generating diversity, but are often imable to recognize the quality of the outputted variants. Humans, on the other hand, can typically discern the quality of an innovation, be it an idea, technology, or design. A computation-based (or other systematic method-based) modeling environment which generates diversity, with an output that allows a person to interactively select and guide the generation of diversity would be very useful.